"And
the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning
as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon
the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and
the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the
waters, because they were made bitter."Revelation
8:10-11

The book of
Revelation describes cataclysmic events that are to happen in the endtime.
Part of these events are signaled by the blowing of seven trumpets by
seven angels. At the sounding of the third trumpet in chapter 8, a great
star called Wormwood was cast into the earth.

The
world's worst ever nuclear meltdown occurred in 1986 at Chernobyl in
Ukraine, at that time one of the states of the Soviet Union. Incredibly,
Chernobyl is the Russian word for wormwood! It appears that the Chernobyl
catastrophe was the fulfillment of the sounding of the third trumpet of
Revelation 8!

The
Meltdown

At 1:22 a.m. on April 26, 1986, a Soviet reactor crew carelessly turned
off the safety systems of the Chernobyl Unit 4 nuclear reactor to perform
an unauthorized safety test.

Within 36
seconds the reactor surged out of control, and a steam explosion pierced
the roof. Deprived of coolant, 150 tons of uranium fuel melted into lava
that oozed into the basement of the reactor.

A
second, hydrogen explosion ignited blocks of graphite, rocketing a hot
plume of radioactive particles a mile into the sky. the explosion was so
powerful that it blew the 2 million pound concrete lid of the reactor into
the air. For three weeks the fire spread out of control, sprinkling
iodine-131 and other nuclides as far as Scandinavia, Italy, and Britain.

In an 18-mile
radius around the reactor, Geiger counters found extraordinarily
high-level "gamma fields" where the fire's plume brushed the
ground. Authorities evacuated 170,000 people, threw up barbed wire, and
declared the area a permanent "exclusion zone."

Impact
of the Disaster

The explosion
in Chernobyl's reactor released an immense cloud of radiation north of the
Ukrainian capital of Kiev. The Chernobyl meltdown released 10 times the
amount of radioactive substances as was released by the bombing of
Hiroshima in World War II!

An estimated
125,000 people in Ukraine have died because of the Chernobyl disaster, and
two million have been infected. Disease rates in some regions are three
times higher for children than before the accident, and four to five times
higher for pregnant women. One million extra cases of cancer are predicted
worldwide within 70 years, Ukrainian scientists estimate. Over 200 million
people have experienced excess exposure to radiation because of Chernobyl.

Dr. Alexander
Rykhlya, director of the department of international scientific and
technical cooperation, gave this opinion: "My view is that as time
passed the medical aftermath will become worse. The peak death rate has
not yet been reached. It will be reached after one or two
generations."

Most severely
affected was the Gomel region, hit first by the radiation: the thyroid
cancer rate there is now about 80 times the world average. "The only
reasonable explanation," write the Belarus officials, "is that
it is a direct consequence of the accident at Chernobyl."

In the most
badly affected areas, such as the Gomel area in the south, just over the
border from Chernobyl, the cesium-137 surface contamination is more that
1,480 kilobecquerels per square meter, 1,000 times the norm. The normal
level of radiation in the soil before the disaster was 1.48 kBq.

In these
areas the forest looks as though it has been struck by lightning. Efforts
are being made to bury radioactive trees, but the financial burden is too
great. Only the animals remain. "There are large numbers of wild
deer, elk and boar because it is a closed area," said Professor
Alexander Stozharov, director of the Research Institute of Radiation
Medicine. "Some are shot by the guards because they can transmit
radiation to the clean zones."

More than 3
million acres of farmland-an area about the size of Connecticut-is
considered lost for a century.

More than
nine years after what everybody calls "the tragedy", Pripyat,
the city near Chernobyl, is still dead and deadly. No one can live here-at
least for long.

Weeds stand
shoulder high along the wide avenues, a Ferris wheel is rusting behind the
cinema. The dozens of tall apartment buildings where 49,000 people once
lived still look new, but their windows are open, broken, blank. Trucks
spray chemicals on decaying streets so their contaminated dust won't be
spread by the breezes that rustle dead leaves of dead trees.

"This is
the one place where you could understand how the world would be after a
nuclear war," says Sergei Akulinin, who lived only 7 minutes from the
Chernobyl power plant where he worked.

All animals
and other foodstuffs that were contaminated by the radiation had to be
destroyed. Several tens of thousands of rabbits raised for meat had to be
destroyed. Nearly 100,000 reindeer being raised in Europe had to be killed
and buried.

Cesium-137
has a half-life of 30 years. As a result when food containing radiation is
eaten, it gets in the muscles and stays for a very long time. It
eventually causes cancer.

The
Waters Made Bitter

The prophecy
of the third trumpet emphasizes that the star called Wormwood made the
waters bitter. As the nuclear cloud produced by Chernobyl drifted over the
Soviet Union and over Europe, and Extraordinary amount of rain fell. The
rain brought the radiation from the nuclear cloud onto the soil, the
animals, the crops, the trees, and into the rivers. The greater the
rainfall, the greater was the amount of radioactivity. These heavy rains
greatly increased the magnitude of this horrible disaster. Much of Europe
was affected. When the prophecy said that many men died because of the
waters, it explicitly described the effect of Chernobyl.

Testimonies
From Chernobyl

Oleg Genrikh
and Anatoly Kurguz were two of the workers on duty at Chernobyl at the
time of the accident. Kruguz sat at his desk and made entries in his log.
Three open doors stood between him and the reactor hall. When the nuclear
reactor blew up, highly radioactive steam with nuclear fuel surged into
the room where Kurguz had been sitting. He dashed through the door.
Closing it, he shouted to Genrikh, "Fire! Everything's' on
fire!"

Genrikh
leaped up from his cot where he had been taking a nap, and dashed to open
his door. He opened it a little, but beyond it was such an unbearable
smell of burning that he gave up trying, and instinctively lay down on the
linoleum, where it was a little cooler. He shouted to Kurguz, "Tolya!
Lie down! It's cooler on the floor!"

Kurguz went
in the Genrikh, and both of them lay down on the floor. "There at
least we were able to breathe. I had a funny burning sensation in my
lungs," Genrikh later recalled.

They waited
about 3 minutes, by which time the heat had abated somewhat-as it should,
since there was now no roof over their heads. Then they want out into the
corridor along axes 50-52 of the building. The severely blistered skin on
Kurguz's bleeding face and arms was hanging off in strips.

On the way to
the control room, Genrikh and Kurguz were joined by two operators from the
gas circuit, Simekonov and Simoninko. By now, Kurguz was in very poor
shape: he was bleeding, and the skin under his clothes was covered with
blisters. No one could do much to help him, as the slightest contact
caused him intense pain. One wonders how he managed to walk the rest of
the way to the medical center. Genrikh's burns were less serious, as he
had been protected by the windowless room. Both of them, however, had
received a dose of 600 roentgens.

Similar
experiences were later recounted by most of the operators that were on
duty that fateful April 26th morning. Most of the Chernobyl personnel that
were working during the meltdown died extremely painful deaths within the
next few weeks or months from radiation exposure.

Could
the Third Trumpet
have been Sounded in 1986?

It is an
awesome thing to contemplate the possibility that the third trumpet of
Revelation 8 was sounded in 1986. Yet the evidence that this is true seems
undeniable. What are the odds that the world's greatest ever nuclear
accident would occur at a nuclear power plant named Wormwood-the exact
name prophesied 2,000 years ago in the Bible?! The prophecy says that it
was because of the waters that were made bitter that many men died. The
conveyance of nuclear radiation by the water was the thing that caused so
many to die.

Some have
thought that the events of the seals, trumpets, and vials of Revelation
must all occur during the Great Tribulation, but scripture does not say
this. It can be proven that the first four seals of Revelation 6 have now
been opened for some time (See chapter three ofA
Message for the President).
It is indisputable that our generation is living in the book of Revelation
right now. We are the generation spoken of by Jesus in Matthew 24:34 when
he said: "Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till
all these things by fulfilled."

As we swiftly
approach the year 2,000, we also are approaching the promised second
coming of Jesus Christ to this earth! Are you ready?!